We rejoice in simplicity of worship. Some people want the worship to be much more complicated with anthems, choir items, and all sorts of people popping up and making a contribution, perhaps even the children to entertain us. It is made sometimes very complex and sometimes massive and powerful choirs. And nowadays of course all the pop groups and the drums. Worship has got to be livened up and made complex. But the simplicity of non-conformist traditional worship is a tremendous strength. Simplicity in life, modesty in life. Oh, no the flesh wants the speaker to be promoted and introduced in an extravagant way and his life story to be publicised and exaggerated. My strength, the demonstration of my power is at its peak in human modesty and humility.
We have seen even in Reformed circles this kind of thing greatly misunderstood. I remember reading in a Christian magazine some years ago some comments about George Whitefield, the great revival preacher in the 1700s. The Great Awakening began in 1739 on a foggy morning out here on the Kennington Common, one of the very first sermons when the Spirit of God came down and George Whitefield would preach to tens of thousands. But people extol George Whitefield – why, the ‘prince of preachers’ they call him. Astonishing, amazing man and this particular comment I read in an evangelical periodical said, ‘When will God send such another?’ Now that was a great mistake, written by a good man, but it was a mistake, and completely contrary to all that the apostle Paul teaches here. We look for a man with certain skills, powers and capacities. We want another prince of preachers, supposedly, and that will arouse hearts and that will do the work. When will we learn? Here, the apostle Paul is given a tremendous handicap and a difficulty and the glory is all the Lord’s and so it actually was with George Whitefield. He was a man who was frequently sick, unwell. Some of his greatest moments, when the Spirit of God came down in unusual power, he was quite ill, quite poorly. He was not at all impressive in appearance. He was quite a small man. He had a pronounced squint; he was not attractive to look at in any way. When you read his sermons, they are great, but you can read much better ones which you would think much more efficient at reaching the hearts of the lost. In fact, he says himself (he doesn’t use these words precisely, this is a modern way of putting it), most of his sermons were cobbled together from Matthew Henry. Now I don’t think he does justice to them entirely but there is a lot in that. He didn’t have a lot of time; that was often the limit of his preparation. I don’t want to denigrate him in any way, because he put himself so entirely at the disposal of the Lord, going from crowd to crowd, draughty barn to draughty barn, wet and ill-treated, things hurled at him and so on. He was a man of immense courage and tremendous labour, given his health and his strength. But it was in weakness that the Spirit of God came down. Again, God worked through a human instrument, labouring under immense limitations.